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It’s great to be back from my holiday travels with my feet firmly planted on the ground. I mean that literally.

During my annual end-of-the-year vacation, I visited family in Independence, Kansas; Edmond, Oklahoma; and Dallas, Texas. I also attended a friend’s wedding in New Orleans. It was a lot of travel packed into a short time – so short, in fact, that in New Orleans I only had time to stop by Central Grocery for a muffuletta.

However, thoughts of the ham and turkey at my sister’s house — she did two breasts, one brined and one injected — were replaced by what happened in the air. My commercial flight to Dallas went without a hitch. The day before Christmas my nephew-in-law picked me up in his Cirrus to take me to Kansas. Soon after we took off from the Addison airport he got an urgent message from the control tower telling him to turn left and ascend rapidly. Turns out we were on a collision course with another plane. That pilot had been cleared to land at Love Field and was landing at the wrong airport. Fortunately, my pilot, Tim Valentine, is steady and sure, and took it all in stride.

Then the day after Christmas my niece, Julia; Tim and their son Timothy and I decided to visit my brother in Edmond. It went without a hitch until the next day when we took off at the Guthrie airport. Soon after take-off, the plane wavered and dropped a bit. Tim cut off our headset and I watched his lips move silently as he conversed with air traffic control and started turning and pressing buttons on his control panel. After a bit he let us know we were making an emergency landing at Wiley Post airport in Oklahoma City. He thought the engine was going out and calmly tried to plot where he could safely deploy the airplane’s parachute, should it be necessary.

We landed safely and it turns out the magnet burned out along with some of the surrounding wiring, so we ended up renting a car and driving to Dallas to visit my other brother, Randy, and his wife, Cathleen.

A16 meatballs

That night we went to La Hacienda Ranchfor Mexican food, since that’s the cuisine I’ve missed since leaving Texas 26 years ago.

Each year after Christmas, Cathleen and Randy throw a dinner party for our combined family and friends — this year, there were 22 — and they used a Chronicle recipe for the meatballs and tomato sauce from A16, so I had a little bit of San Francisco in Texas. It confirmed what I already knew: These are still some of the best meatballs I’ve ever tasted.

We also had Mexican food on my last night in town, naturally.

Now I realize this is a food/restaurant blog so I need to tie my in flight experience into the subject. I can tell you thoughts of what I might like for my last meal definitely did not come into my consciousness as we hovered 3,500 feet above the ground.